Romancefest 2011: The Rules of the Game

Jean Renoir's THE RULES OF THE GAME might seem like an unlikely candidate for Romancefest because it's not really a romance in a traditional sense. There simply is no central couple to root for. However, it is about a group of adults who are obsessed with their frivolous relationships to the point of distraction.

This is the first foreign film of Romancefest. I've been working off of the American Film Institute's list of "100 Films, 100 Passions" and I'm running out of films. So, this film takes us to France, a country synonymous with romance.

THE RULES OF THE GAME is often considered one of the greatest films of all time. Watching the film, I was able to intellectually admire the technical wizardry at work, but it is difficult to clear my mind of the 70 years of films that came after this one. The movie didn't really engage me emotionally until the last few scenes, and I imagine the average modern viewer would give up by then. Then again I suppose if you're sitting down and deliberately choosing to watch this movie, you are the type of person who might stick with it regardless.

The story involves a wide variety of characters who meet up at a hunting estate in the French countryside outside of Paris. The big ensemble cast ranges from the idle rich to their servants, and multiple love affairs are carried on between the various characters. This is the type of movie where everyone has a secret or has told a lie to someone else, everyone's sneaking around behind each other's backs, and characters are constantly sneaking down corridors and flitting from room to room either to report some gossip or to commit an act worth gossiping about.

The main group of characters include Roland Toutain as a record-breaking aviator who is disappointed that the woman he is in love with (Nora Gregor) fails to show up at his triumphant landing. She is married to the rich owner of the hunting lodge in question (Marcel Dalio) who in turn is carrying on an affair with another woman (Mila Parely). In an attempt to approach these entanglements with class, each lover kind of agrees to look the other way and they all meet up for a weekend in the country.

Meanwhile, the various servants carry on similar affairs. Gregors' servant (Paulette Dubost) is married to the game warden (Gaston Modot) but has a poacher (Julien Carette) chasing after her. The aviators' assistant, played by Renoir himself, is also chasing Dubost, while carrying on an intimate friendship with Gregor that dates back to childhood.

Eventually all the intrigue leads to a murder stemming from a case of mistaken identity, but there's a lot of running around and partner swapping before we get to that point. Most of the love affairs seem to be carried out more as a hobby than as anything involving lust or passion, and the characters are just as content to look the other way as they are to pretend to be offended or intrigued by each others' love lives. There seems to be an unspoken agreement between everyone that as long as they carry on in a certain way, it's okay. If they carry on in a non-approved way, we run into problems. And I guess that's the rules, and that's the game.

The movie was a controversy when it first came out, upsetting filmgoers and banned by entire governments. In a way, the movie breaks the rules of the game itself by admitting there's a game. My assumption is that audiences weren't used to movies turning around and pointing a finger at them. They were used to the unspoken agreement that movies agree to show fantasy, reinforce stereotypes, and keep making excuses for society by kind of looking the other way. Instead, THE RULES OF THE GAME is a "warts and all" portrait.

There's a memorably graphic hunting sequence at the heart of the film in which the various characters kill game on the estate for sport, shooting rabbits and birds and other small animals. The whole thing is set up as a sort of artificial ritual. The characters go through the motions of the hunt without truly "hunting" anything, just like they go through the motions of their love lives without really "loving" anyone but themselves.

This movie, like SUNRISE, has lots of long takes and complex camera set ups that would be difficult today even with all of our advances in technology, and therefore must have been nearly impossible back then. Unlike SUNRISE, this film involves more than a couple characters, and there are long sequences in which the camera keeps rolling and moving around the house as ten or twenty people run in and out of frame, carrying on overlapping conversations and advancing multiple story lines.

I think a movie like this takes multiple viewings to really enjoy on a profound level, and I'm afraid I will probably never give it those multiple viewings. Still, I'm glad I've seen it.